How Lenoir-Rhyne turned degree audit implementation into curriculum improvement

When Lenoir-Rhyne’s provost arrived, graduation audits were one of the first places they looked to make a real difference. Every review meant the registrar’s office carefully piecing together years of advising decisions and requirement exceptions from spreadsheets, emails, and institutional memory, one student at a time. Improving degree audit became an institutional priority right away.

The closer the team looked, the more opportunity they found. Advising and graduation clearance lived in separate places from curriculum knowledge itself. Faculty advised students from conversations and memory, while the registrar’s office pieced those same decisions back together later, without always having a record to check against. Without one shared source of truth, everyone was doing their best with a slightly different piece of the picture.

Jeni and the provost had been through a traditional degree audit implementation together at a previous school, so they knew both the payoff and the pain that could come with it. They chose Stellic to build a shared source of truth, one that would work for students and faculty as well as the registrar’s office, without the heavy lift they’d experienced before.

Configuring the platform quickly became about more than software. Every requirement had to be translated into rules Stellic could apply consistently, and that process surfaced places where the curriculum depended on institutional memory rather than a clear, written definition.

A requirement might call for six hours of English literature. Which courses count? Lenoir-Rhyne answered that. A seminary program required a gospel class. Which courses qualified? It had simply never come up before.

These were questions manual processes let different people answer differently for years. Building the audit gave Lenoir-Rhyne a reason to put those answers in writing which in turn created alignment across departments. That clarity left the curriculum easier to understand for everyone who has to work with it.

For Jeni, that became one of the most valuable parts of the whole project. Every ambiguous requirement was a chance to document what the institution actually meant and improve the curriculum in the process.

Not everyone was equally comfortable moving fast, and that balance shaped how the team launched: they didn’t wait for a perfect audit before putting it in front of students. Advisors and students reported anything that looked off through a shared inbox, giving the team a steady stream of feedback they could act on quickly. Students who arrived after rollout picked it up right away.

Graduation audits that once took 30 to 45 minutes now take 12 to 15. Instead of reconstructing years of email and spreadsheet history, the registrar’s office verifies degree completion in one system.

Faculty build academic plans with students, log advising conversations, and answer many of their own questions without routing everything through the registrar. What once needed an email and a follow-up now gets resolved directly in Stellic.

Workflow automation added another layer of relief. Since moving substitution requests online, Lenoir-Rhyne has processed 547 of them digitally, replacing a paper form that once traveled across campus before landing on the registrar’s desk. Advisors have more visibility now, students get decisions faster, and the university is already looking at what else it can bring into the platform.

What started as a technology rollout turned into an ongoing process of improving the curriculum itself. With substitutions, exceptions, and audit questions flowing through one system, patterns are easy to spot. A cross-listed course, an outdated course number, a curriculum revision that never made it into the student information system: each one used to be a one-off fix. Now each becomes an improvement that carries forward for every student who follows.

The same work that clarified Lenoir-Rhyne’s own degree requirements is about to do the same for the credits students bring in from elsewhere. Transfer evaluation is next on the list, and the team expects Stellic to bring the same consistency and transparency to it that degree audit already has, giving prospective students faster answers and more confidence earlier in the enrollment process.